This mainboard is targeted for those users who do not deal with any overclocking and prefer to have their systems run in nominal mode with the default settings. In this case the functionality of the Intel P67 Express chipset has been extended with a number of additional controllers delivering USB 3.0, PATA and eSATA support. Plus, the price of this product is really attractive.

Performance Comparison

As usual, we are going to compare the mainboards speeds in two different modes: in nominal mode and during CPU and memory overclocking. The first mode is interesting because it shows how well the mainboards work with their default settings. It is a known fact that most users do not fine-tune their systems, they simply choose the optimal BIOS settings and do nothing else. That is why we run a round of tests almost without interfering in any way with the default mainboard settings. For comparison purposes we are going to also include the results for Asus Sabertooth P67, GigabyteGA-P67A-UD4-B3 and Intel DP67BG. The results are sorted out in descending order and those of Foxconn P67A-S are marked with darker color on the diagrams.

We used Cinebench 11.5. All tests were run five times and the average result of the five runs was taken for the performance charts.

We have been using Fritz Chess Benchmark utility for a long time already and it proved very illustrative. It generated repeated results, the performance in it is scales perfectly depending on the number of involved computational threads.

A small video in x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 is encoded in two passes and then the entire process is repeated four times. The average results of the second pass are displayed on the following diagram:

We measured the performance in Adobe Photoshop using our own benchmark made from Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test that has been creatively modified. It includes typical editing of four 10-megapixel images from a digital photo camera.

In the archiving test a 1 GB file is compressed using LZMA2 algorithms, while other compression settings remain at defaults.

Like in the data compression test, the faster 16 million of Pi digits are calculated, the better. This is the only benchmark where the number of processor cores doesn’t really matter, because it creates single-threaded load.

There are good and bad things about complex performance tests. However, Futuremark benchmarking software has become extremely popular and is used for comparisons a lot. The diagram below shows the average results after three test-runs in 3DMark11 Performance mode with default settings:

Since we do not overclock graphics in our mainboard reviews, the next diagram shows only CPU tests from the 3DMark11 – Physics Score.

We use FC2 Benchmark Tool to go over Ranch Small map ten times in 1920x1080 resolution with high image quality settings in DirectX 10.

Resident Evil 5 game also has a built-in performance test. Its peculiarity is that it can really take advantage of multi-core processor architecture. The tests were run in DirectX 10 in 1920x1080 resolution with high image quality settings. The average of five test runs was taken for further analysis:

As we have expected, there is hardly any difference between these related mainboard. All of them run at almost the same speed, and Foxconn P67A-S is pretty much as fast as the others. Now let’s run the same exact tests in overclocked mode, when both - processor and memory – work at higher frequencies. I have to remind you that the CPU on Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD4-B3 was overclocked to 4.7 GHz, while our today’s hero had to stop at 4.5 GHz. The CPU frequency was increased to 4.8 GHz on other main boards participating in our today’s test session. Memory worked at 1600 MHz with 6-6-6-18-1T timings in all cases.

The performance difference here is much more noticeable, and Foxconn P67A-S falls about 6% behind the mainboards capable of overclocking the processor to its maximum.